Sheshbazzar

Sorry for the delayed reply. I live on a farm and there are many chores that need to be attended to.

To keep this as simple as possible.

1. Some version of the New Testament is easily available to everyone participating in this Forum.

As virtually any individual who would claim to hold a 'belief in a historical Jesus', as well as those that state that they 'DO NOT believe in a historical Jesus', should be basing their reasons for their acceptance or non-acceptance of the premise, on their acceptance or denial of the accuracy or historicity of each of the various statements made within these TEXTS, which are anyones only credible source for making any such a decision.
Simply, you've got to know what it says, to actually know whether you accept and agree with it, or not.

-Yes, that omits those that claim that they can ignore the actual content of these TEXTS because they have a Direct Pipeline to God, and He tells them to ignore these TEXTS that the rest of the world must depend on to make their decisions as to the validity and the existence or not of any manner of 'historical Jesus'.

I don't claim to have any Direct Pipeline to God. Do you?
Or do you personally know anyone that has a Direct Pipeline To God, that you can simply follow and obey without question?
If so, then the rest of this will not apply to you.

However if you are a normal average and somewhat intelligent human being, -one not hearing disembodied voices in your head-, then these TEXTS are what you ought to be using to make any decision one way or the other.

2. There are a lot of otherwise intelligent people, who make poor decisions and bad choices by not first closely examining and weighing ALL of the material.

Certainly it is easy to locate 'proof texts' to support a presupposition about Jesus. religious people do this every day, and so do many atheists and agnostics.

It is so much easier to give more 'weight' to whatever texts that agree with ones personal views and no 'weight' at all to whatever does not fit in with ones views.

But using such 'proof texts' to formulate a conclusion suffers from the flaw of only using that 2 to 5% of the text that one actually believes to be historical, while disregarding the other 95 to 98% of the texts which they either DO NOT believe, or cannot identify or support with 100% certainty as being literal, or historical accounts.

Setting aside the fact that the greater majority of people, including most of whom argue on this Forum are NOT Greek literate, and couldn't read either a sentence of Greek or of Hebrew even if their very live depended upon it, they are nonetheless very voluble and adamant in their opinions.

But your example is a very good one for showing why it is necessary to examine and weigh the historical value and credibility of ALL of the verses without discriminating or assigning any lesser value or weight to verses that do not coincide with your personal predilections.
Now if you customarily use or accept as 'historical' on the high side, say only around 10% of the total New Testament Gospels some 3780 verses,(more or less depending on the version) the differences in the rendering of this verse could possibly be statistically significant, but such variations become minuscule when ALL of the texts are treated equally and ALL are given equal weight.

I will here remind our religious members of a few pertinent inspired verses about weight and measure and things that are equal.
Non believers, and antinomians might question themselves as to whether they are ethically free from the ethics of 'doing no injustice in judgment', or in weight, meteyard and measure.
Things which, if you study and treat with equality ALL of the texts, are spoken of as maintained right through Revelations, and into Eternity.



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Sheshbazzar

J-D as I said before, do what ever you want.
If you don't wish to calculate how much of the texts you actually find to be 'historical' and how much of the texts you find to be questionable, that certainly is your prerogative.

I made a suggestion for those individuals who might wish to become more concretely aware of where they stand on these matters.
I am certainly under no delusion that I can cause the unwilling to engage in any study project they do not wish to.

Have a nice life.

Sheshbazzar

rlogan

I taught statistics at the undergraduate and grauate levels for business and economics students for about 20 years. Model selection criteria is what applies to this discussion. In applied work I liked the Davidson an MacKinnon J-test for non-nested models like this myth vs historical discussion and have tried to explain the basic idea before, but [b]Spin[b]'s remarks are germane once again. What's the point?

Maybe for whatever few are here that might be interested, the true test of a model is not how it does against nothing. It needs to be tested against the explanatory power of competing alternatives. The J-test for example is a very interesting two-step procedure that examines how much additional explaining one model does after its competitor does the best it can. Then you switch the roles of the null model and the alternative. There are four ways it can work out and I do think it very much applies here but you'd need a group of people working together on it in a productive work environment and this obviously isn't it.

You are just waving your hands without demonstrating relevancy and why you should pursue one course of action vs. another, nor do you even know what they are. This is a very simple matter and I have given important concrete examples instead of making aimless comments.

The virgin birth is a data point. It is in the text. One methodology is to get rid of it because your methodology is to eliminate all the things that are non-human or troubling to your theory of a human Jesus. At the end of that methodology you have a skeletal Jesus - just about no data at all.

Another methodology is to demonstrate that it came from Isaiah 7:14, Septuigint version. It is following a model of constructing this Jesus by mining the Hebrew Bible, and it explains the data we have instead of throwing out the data because it is inconsistent with our theory.

If you want to be productively discussing this, then deal with the problem in concrete terms instead of just throwing out aimless stuff like "dealing with corrupt data is a problem in statistics".


Well we just disagree here.

Blah blah blah - not one word about the subject at hand. Why do you want to talk in vague handwaving terms or about electron charges instead of Bible Criticism and History? Spin is just so right.

outhouse

only if you throw out logic reason and knowledge, such is a failed methodology.


there is a clear written record of man creating mythology from mortal men, and building mythology around them. and the opposite, man has created men around mythology

how can you throw such a example away, without further study to line up said statistics your so proud of??

J-D

And if you do not wish to give any explanation of why you recommend the methodology you do, that is your prerogative. I also am certainly under no delusion that I can cause the unwilling to engage in any project they do not wish to. I have explained what conclusion I think is supported by your omission. You have a nice life too.

rlogan

I don't think it is so much a matter of understanding as it is even being willing to consider breaking out from the hegemony spin has described.

Not one person EVER on this forum has expressed interest in the fact there is a hard science that has readily available testing for one model vs. another in quite rigorous terms when I have brought the subject up.


Non-numeric or qualitative data is a red herring issue. Trivially easy to deal with. We call them qualitative variables or qualitative choice models. See, all these criticisms are just knee-jerk reactions from the hegemony of the status quo.

It would take a group of people working towards a common objective of applying this science to the problem and agreeing on the best approach. Some very unsophisticated statistical tools have been used to compare overlap in the different gospels and to arrive at the Q hypothesis for example, but far more powerful work can be done with more sophisticated tools.

No. We call what remains unexplained the "residual" or "residuals". We do not throw them out. The residuals are extremely important. Residuals can be analyzed and very often point to ground-breaking patterns that solve problems that weren't rexognized before.

In any case if one hypothesis explains 74% of the data or whatever perfectly and the other explains 2% - this criticism that "you didn't explain everything" is silly on the face of it. Much of what is in there like "and it came to pass", transitional stuff, and other things are not necessary to explain at all. The agreement on these kinds of delineations would not be difficult - it would just take people working together on it productively.

I see this is a favorite of yours. But if it was attended with what was not clear, then I would see it as sincere instead of an ad-hom.

You don't show any interest in bringing in a well-developed science to the problem and I suspect part of it is knowing how badly the historical jesus does just by casual knowledge of how many things come from the Hebrew Bible.

The Christians have actually done a lot of work for us in claiming hundreds of Hebrew Bible prophecies came to pass with Jesus. I doubt rigorous fair counting will come up with that many, but how many data points are there in total with any of these "historical jesus" models? He was an itinerant preacher that got executed by pilate. Two data points right there so far - wow.

But if you start with Mark, he TELLS you that as the prophets have written a voice in the wilderness heralding Jesus with John eating locusts and honey - you can track all of this down by prophetic verse where it came from like the author tells you.

meh. Why bother. I posted because I was in such agreement with spin. It isn't possible to introduce something like this here.

J-D

Part of the definition of 'hegemony' that spin cited was 'a set of dominant cultural values together with the institutions which maintain them'.

I asked spin what dominant cultural values, and what institutions maintaining them, are relevant to the present discussion. spin did not reply.If it's possible to do the sort of rigorous statistical testing you describe, I would be very interested in seeing it. I'm not a statistician, so I can't do it.

spin

I got the idea that you just weren't reading closely enough and had no interest in understanding hegemony. You haven't changed this idea.

I specifically stated in my last post on the subject "You accept as competent the institutions that determine many of those values, legal, educational, medical, religious, media." Perhaps you wanted names and addresses.

I also indicated that all received values, those from your parents (well mostly), from school, from mass media, are the values of hegemony, later adding "It is usually only through accidents or changes of perspective (such as are gained by leaving the particular hegemony and entering another) that one can begin to perceive the reality of hegemony."

You have apparently done nothing since then to see if what I'd said was full of shit or not. Hegemony is a wonderful thing.

J-D

What I asked you was which are the dominant cultural values, and which are the institutions maintaining them, that are relevant to the present discussion. Saying 'values received from your parents, from school, from mass media' doesn't answer this question. People aren't always explicitly conscious of the values they've received from their parents, from school, from mass media; besides, you don't know what values I've received from my parents, from school, or from mass media, and they aren't automatically the ones you received.

spin

You seem to be argumentative and seeking further information from me, when if you were interested you would willingly be searching for a better understanding of hegemony. I have tried to point you in a constructive direction, supplied you with a little good online material (Williams is good). I have tried to crystalize the notion for you, so that you might continue, after expressing difficulty with Williams. And you can only respond "you don't know what values I've received from my parents, from school, or from mass media". As I said hegemony is a wonderful thing, and it certainly isn't monodimensional.